Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

blog.ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 629 posts

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#561

Post by Sniffnoy »

rsync wrote: post #539
rspeer wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you're saying Gödel's incompleteness theorems come in, but I agree that DAO is a game of Nomic. Now... the ability to hard-fork is kind of in the rules as well. So it's a Nomic with a complicated endgame. Some guy just won the Nomic, but now he's finding that not only do you want to win, you want to win subtly , or else a majority can vote to undo your win. But anyone who still thinks DAO is an investm…

"Not sure where you're saying Gödel's incompleteness theorems come in, but I agree that DAO is a game of Nomic." I know what he means - he's suggesting that you can't ever get a bulletproof or watertight set of rules or guidelines for a system because ... blah blah ... Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is a very tempting idea and I myself have given it a lot of thought over the years. The problem is, Gödel's incom…

Godel's theorem applies to systems that model the natural numbers (specifically, Robinson arithmetic), not real numbers. The first-order theory of the real numbers is decidable. (The second-order theory is not, since you can define the natural numbers in that, and then Godel's theorem applies.)

Your general point, of course, that Godel's theorem means a specific thing, and people should stop abusing it as if it means "everything has loopholes!", remains correct.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#562

Post by mikeash »

programmarchy wrote: post #533
mikeash wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy to me about the whole thing isn't the bug in the DAO nor the fact that it's being taken advantage of. As you say, it's all very early stuff, and there's no surprise that it hasn't been fully worked out yet. What does surprise me is that people poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into this new, unproven thing. To me, this says that while Ethereum itself may be technologically fine, the co…

Isn't pouring millions of dollars into new, unproven things the entire premise of venture capitalism? Great risk for great reward. The outrageous investment in Ethereum/DAO does seem to highlight a desire for governance models outside of the corporatist status quo we live under today, though. Personally, I don't think it's bonkers to yearn for something better. But it's a hope that needs to be tempered with vigilance…

Usually the millions of dollars comes after there's some sort of promise shown. This is basically the equivalent of doing an IPO with nothing but a nice-sounding business plan, and having people shower you with money only to discover that, oops, your real business plan is to take the money and flee to the Cayman Islands with it.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#563

Post by wslh »

DennisP wrote: post #407
wslh wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a different problem here: Ethereum and the DAO were not in a mature state to handle this amount of money. For example, there is a limited support for upgrading contracts in Ethereum and the DAO was not reviewed enough to handle hundreds of million dollars. Also, there are methods to make the software ultra secure using formal models.

Contracts can be upgraded if they're designed that way. You can have a wrapper contract that just calls out to other contracts, where the addresses of the other contracts are updateable. You can even make the callee run in the context of the caller, so all the data is held at the caller, which calls an external function that manipulates it. Doing this is a tradeoff. On the one hand it lets you fix bugs and vulnerabil…

Are you referring to this kind of upgrades https://gist.github.com/Arachnid/4ca9da48d51e23e5cfe0f0e14dd... ? Because you have an important limitation if you use that approach.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#564

Post by jsprogrammer »

rsync wrote: post #539
rspeer wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you're saying Gödel's incompleteness theorems come in, but I agree that DAO is a game of Nomic. Now... the ability to hard-fork is kind of in the rules as well. So it's a Nomic with a complicated endgame. Some guy just won the Nomic, but now he's finding that not only do you want to win, you want to win subtly , or else a majority can vote to undo your win. But anyone who still thinks DAO is an investm…

"Not sure where you're saying Gödel's incompleteness theorems come in, but I agree that DAO is a game of Nomic." I know what he means - he's suggesting that you can't ever get a bulletproof or watertight set of rules or guidelines for a system because ... blah blah ... Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is a very tempting idea and I myself have given it a lot of thought over the years. The problem is, Gödel's incom…

The set of all real numbers is unconstructable. Gödel's proof requires only a finite amount of natural numbers.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#566

Post by DennisP »

drewm1980 wrote: post #556
DennisP wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case the contract holds 15% of all ether. The fork won't be enacted unless a majority of the community agrees to run its code. That's not likely to happen except in extreme cases, like this one.

Is 15% really that extreme? This is a game; nothing of real value in the world is being created or destroyed (that wasn't already during mining). I personally hope the ethereum community decides to play this game out and not bail out the DAO. It's way too early in the social experiment to change the rules.

Lots of people have traded serious amounts of real money for those game tokens.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#567

Post by al_chemist »

Taek wrote: post #466

There's a pretty significant lesson here, and it's not that the DAO authors were careless. They were, and so were all of the investors, but the core problem is not the DAO. It's Solidity. It's the Ethereum virtual machine. Even today, security vulnerabilities are being found in code strategies that are generally considered 'best practice'. Writing a safe smart contract on Ethereum is extremely difficult, and most peo…

> Writing a safe smart contract on Ethereum is extremely difficult

Writing may be difficult. It's reading that should be easy. Unless you can read the contract, you can't put your money there and an example of Etherum contract looks like this:

    ADD
    SWAP1
    RETURN
    JUMPDEST
    PUSH1 0x60
    SWAP4
    DUP5
    MSTORE
    PUSH1 0x80
    SWAP3
    DUP4
    MSTORE
    PUSH1 0xa0
    SWAP2
    SWAP1
    (750 lines omitted)

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#568

Post by voxic11 »

rsync wrote: post #546
ar0 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If this soft and hard fork idea really goes through, it seems that now you are in fact getting the worst of both worlds: For your contract, you have to write code that apparently is very hard to get right and bug-free[1], while at the same time you are at the whim of a "community" -- whose decisions (sorry, "suggestions") can apparently be announced by one guy in a blog post -- not to deem what you are doing…

I think this comment on the original blog post says it very well: "To be clear, if this happened due to an exploit in the software, then I can accept a hard fork fixing the issue. However, if the DAO team made a mistake in the way they designed their smart contract, as an issue of principle, they should not be "bailed out" by the Ethereum team because they are "to big to fail." Hard lessons like these teach the crypt…

Do you own ethereum that will undoubtedly fall in value if the attacker is allowed to start dumping their earnings? It's within the network at larges interest to fork, so that is what will happen.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#569

Post by CoryG89 »

drewm1980 wrote: post #556
DennisP wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case the contract holds 15% of all ether. The fork won't be enacted unless a majority of the community agrees to run its code. That's not likely to happen except in extreme cases, like this one.

Is 15% really that extreme? This is a game; nothing of real value in the world is being created or destroyed (that wasn't already during mining). I personally hope the ethereum community decides to play this game out and not bail out the DAO. It's way too early in the social experiment to change the rules.

I agree that 15% may not be that extreme, but 15% is not all that's at stake. 100% of all ether existing has so far lost 20% of its value (relative to other currencies at the time of the article's writing). I wouldn't be surprised if it continued to drop further. This may cause enough panic among miners to actually get a majority to agree to a hard fork.

Edit: for the record, I don't own use Ethereum or own any ether, so I would also hope that a hard fork doesn't happen to bail out a single contract, but I have no financial incentive on the line.

Post reply on HN